Development of the Raspberry Pi camera module is almost finished and should be out next month. The Raspberry Pi Foundation was working on a camera module since May last year, but first real photos were shown last month. As the development is almost finished, the first camera boards are already in production and should start selling sometime in April.

"We've sent the first camera boards to production, and we're expecting to be able to start selling them some time in April," said Pi Foundation's Liz Upton.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation also joined a Google Glass style contest where they give away 10 camera boards to testers who will do extra-hard testing of the Pi's Eye. To apply for the camera, you need to email the Raspberry Pi with a magnificent, imaginative, computationally interesting thing you would like to do with a Raspberry Pi camera board.

"The reason we're giving these cameras away is that we want you to help us to do extra-hard testing. We want the people we send these boards to do something computationally difficult and imaginative with them, so that the cameras are pushed hard in the sort of bonkers scheme that we've seen so many of you come up with here before with your Pis, and so that we can learn how they perform (and make adjustments if necessary). The community here always seems to come up with applications for the stuff we do that we wouldn't have thought of in a million years; we thought we should take advantage of that," said Liz Upton.

The prototype camera measures 20x25x10 mm and has the capability of taking pictures and recording HD video at 15 to 60 frames per second. The cost of the camera module will be $25, the same as the recently launched Model A Raspberry Pi.